What Can We Do With 500 Billion Words?

What Can We Do With 500 Billion Words?

April 18-20th, 2013IU Bloomington

This spring, please join us for What Can We Do with 500 Billion Words?, a workshop organized around the themes of language, learning and big data, with distinguished speakers from across the United States and Europe.

The workshop will center on several compelling issues:
· New resources and technologies that are rapidly changing the nature of research into human culture and cognition.
· The advent of large-scale, searchable data sets, which are providing researchers with unparalleled access to human behavior ‘in the wild’.
· An emerging framework for engaging with these tools, whether the aim is to unearth historical trends, predict the stock market, or more deeply investigate the mechanisms that underpin symbolic communication.
· How to mine these data sets for insights into the mind, using cognitively-grounded models from cognitive science, animal learning, and linguistics.

Thanks to generous support from the IU Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) and the IU Cognitive Science Program, the workshop will host eight external speakers in the disciplines of psychology, linguistics, and computer science. Our invited guests include: Aaron Blaisdell of UCLA, Adele Goldberg of Princeton, Dan Jurafsky of Stanford, Ed Wasserman of the University of Iowa, Harald Baayen and Michael Ramscar of the University of Tuebingen, Mark Davies of Brigham Young, Mark Liberman of UPenn, and Morten Christiansen of Cornell.

Registration is free and open to the IU community. If you plan on attending, please register your attendance through the workshop website.